"Yes, those wickedly fascinating boys got me to go off with them," the pink robix confessed, "by promising me I could censor their poetry and write moral fables for newly-constructed robixes. They were quite nice, even if they didn't keep all their promises-they introduced me to shades of wool I didn't know existed and they'd hold my yarn by the hour and talk to me. But those old society ladies!" Her anodized aluminum quivered. "Nothing but lusts of the flesh and floods of four-letter words. In between they smoked pipes. I wanted Zane to gag them with their own diamond jewelry and weld it tight, but he's too kind hearted." She gazed at him fondly across the flier's plush cabin with its scattering of spilled drinks and trodden-in appetizers.
Signal Five-Half Pint's by a process of elimination-had taken Zane, Flaxman, and Miss Blushes out across the Pacific, far beyond the last purple algae field, to where a sinister low vessel rode the lonely waves just beyond the three-hundred-mile limit-the heavily-armed gambling barge Queen of the Syndicate, which boasted the Solar System's oldest permanent floating crap game.
The barge's armament and eagle-eyed lookouts made airborne approach out of the question. Setting the big flier to circle the Queen at five miles, Zane put his water-resistant construction to the test by dropping into the sea with a space-suit jet unit equipped with extra tanks. In this he drove toward his goal thirty feet under water-a living torpedo. Arriving at the Queen undetected, he cut a hole of carefully calculated size in her bottom and in the course of the considerable excitement this caused aboard, he tethered his jet sea-horse and climbed swiftly up the side-a dripping metal Neptune darkly crowned. His radio-busby allowed him to find in a trice the cabin where the abominable Filippo Fenicchia was trickling nitric acid on Half Pint (with his plug-in eye turned round to watch) in an effort to get the brain to swear on his mother's honor to join the Syndicate at a high level as a memory unit, scare-gadget, and super-spy-the Garrote had begun to see vastly greater potentialities in the canned brains than the blackmailing of a second-class publishing firm.
"He had me pegged," Half Pint put in. "If I had sworn, I would have kept my word-you learn to do that in two hundred years or you go crazy. It would have been an interesting life too-he said, for instance, 'Think how a Syndicate traitor would feel if he opened his suitcase and there you were, staring at him with that eye of yours and telling him he was doomed'-but I got fascinated wondering when I'd start to get scared. And stubborn. And I wanted to draw him out. That acid wouldn't have brought pain to me, you see-just new sensations and maybe new ideas. For a little while."
The instant Zane had burst into the cabin, the robot would have been paralyzed by a shorting-beam the all-foreseeing Fenicchia directed at him, except that Zane was carrying before him a copper net that acted as a Faraday Cage. On seeing the acid-eaten splotches on Half Pint's shell, the robot reached with one pincher for the alkali base the Garrote had ready to neutralize the nitric, and crying, "A yegg for an egg!" slapped the gray gang leader in the face with the other-knocking out half his teeth and removing a large chunk of cheek and chin, half his upper lip, and the end of his nose.
Instantly Zane had poured the neutralizer on Half Pint, snatched him up, and dashed past catastrophe-confused gangsters to plunge into the sea where his jet unit was tethered. Doubting the egg's capacity to resist water under pressure, the robot had scudded along just below the surface, holding Half Pint aloft in one pincher.
"Oh boy, what a ride," the latter put in, adding wistfully, "I could almost feel that water."
"It must indeed have been a strange sight," Zane admitted, "if any of the crew took time off to watch from saving the Queen: a silver egg racing mysteriously through the wave tops."
"Don't, it gives me the creeps!" Flaxman put in, hunching his shoulders and squeezing his eyes shut. "Excuse me, Half Pint."
Reaching the five-mile circle, Zane had radioed Miss Blushes and coached her into hovering the flier above him while Flaxman let down a ladder. The first thing the robot had done when he climbed aboard was to twirl a fresh fontanel into Half Pint.
"I don't believe that eight-hour jazz," Half Pint said. "As I recall it, we all just pretended to pass out that time to scare the nurse."
"Tell me one thing, Zane," Gaspard asked curiously. "What would have happened if your jet unit had failed?"
"I would infallibly have sunk to the bottom of the sea," the robot replied. "I would be lying there right now, holding Half Pint in my arms and-if my structure and headlamp had held out-contemplating the beauties of sediment and abyssal life. Or more likely, knowing my nature, I'd be trying to walk to shore."
"It all goes to show you," the stray congressman said, his voice beginning to thicken as he slopped more whisky in his glass.
"It does indeed, sir," Zane echoed.
"Well, at any rate now you can get back to Project El with a clear conscience," Gaspard told him.
"That's true, I can," Zane agreed with disappointing brevity.
"Look, there's the coast," Miss Blushes said. "The wonderful lights of New Angeles, like a carpet of stars. Oh, I feel romantic."
"What's this Project El?" Flaxman asked Zane. "Anything to do with Rocket House?"
"Yes, sir, in a fashion."
"One of Cullingham's babies?" Flaxman pressed. "You know, I'm worried there. This Ibsen babe may drain him dry as a dead grasshopper and we'll have to take over everything he's doing."
"No, this bad nothing to do with Mr. Cullingham," Zane assured him. "But if you don't mind, I'd rather not discuss it at present."
"Self-assigned project, hey?" Flaxman said shrewdly. "Well, anything for the hero-and believe me, I mean that, Zane."
"I know a secret," Half Pint said.
"Shut up," Zane told him and pulled his speaker plug.
FORTY
Leaving the stray congressman to explain to wondering controlmen how he had piloted the executive flier from the Mohave to an oceanic gambling hell and back completely blacked out-or at most with the help of a few friendly hallucinations-the Rocket House party taxied home to find the place a renewed shambles inhabited only by a dazedly wandering Joe the Guard and twenty blue-uniformed Little League moonball players sitting rigidly at attention in the foyer.
The chunkiest of these sprang up and barked at Flaxman, "Dear sir, we are fans and faithful followers of your Outer Sports and Space Rookie series. Our moonball team has been chosen by the Fannish Presidium to-"
"That's fine, that's wonderful," Flaxman bellowed, touseling the boy's hair and peering about anxiously as though he expected to find large holes in the fabric of the building. "Gaspard, buy these young heroes some ice cream. I'll talk to you later, boys. Joe, snap out of it and tell me what's happened. Miss Bishop, phone the Nursery. Zane, scout the storerooms. Miss Blushes, get me a cigar."
"There's been chaos raging through here and no mistake, Mr. Flaxman," Joe began dolefully. "Government raid. They come busting in through every door and the roof. Fat guy the others called Mr. Mears roughs me up and asks, 'Where are they? Where are those things that are going to write books?' So I show him the three eggheads up in Cullingham's office. He laughs sarcastic-like and says, 'I don't mean these. I know all about these-they're hopeless idiots. Besides, how could they do the work of wordmills, being so much smaller?' I say, 'They're not idiots, they're so smart they're nasty. Speak up, Rusty,' I say and would you believe it, that crazy egg won't say anything but, 'Goo-goo-goo!' Well, after that they just tore the place apart, hunting hidden wordmills. Even tested our big typewriters to see if they'd write anything by themselves. And they went into Accounting and chopped up the old computer. Top of everything else, they impounded my skunk pistol-said it was an internationally illegal horror-weapon, banned in perpetuity along with copper bullets, dum-dums, saw-tooth bayonets, and spring-poisoning chemicals."